On Jun 30, 2013, at 2:06 PM, Evelio VILA <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Hi Andy;
> 
> I'm taking this to mean that you find that iteration constructs and new 
> structures move the language away from simplicity and their utility does not 
> offset that lo 
> ss of simplicity. Is that right?
> 
> indeed. I should had been more clear ;) 
>  
> 
> We've found that many end up resorting to using inline templates to do many 
> things that are not related to generating text, which is what a template is 
> intended to be. Have you not found that to be the case for you?
> 
>  i dont remember using inline template as a last resort solution. it is true 
> though that its a pretty useful hack.   every time i am confronted with a 
> need for a loop, i use create_resources. if the problem reveals to be more 
> complicated than that, then we turn to other types of solutions(functions, 
> providers, etc)
> 
> i think that that feature is a drift on puppet 'fundamentals'.
> 
> on the other hand, what we would really love to see:
> 
> a serious increase on performance. simply adding more resources to the master 
> or installing more masters when the number of clients grow is clearly not a 
> scalable solution. imho there are lots of work to be done here. (even if ruby 
> has its limitations on this matter)

Hi,

We're definitely doing this.  You should have seen significant performance 
differences in Puppet 3.2 and now PE 3.0, and we now have consistent, 
repeatable performance tests baked into our CI.  We're in the process of 
building out a dedicated performance team to really focus on this, too.

We also recognize the pain of things like scaling, so while we're trying to 
reduce the need to scale, we're also working on making that scaling itself 
easier.  This varies from things like making it easier to get a master up and 
running to configuring the various masters to provide different services and 
connecting them all with a message bus.

So yeah, we've heard this complaint loud and clear, and we are working on it.  
And I'm happy to say you're already seeing the benefits, so you don't just have 
to trust us.

> a production ready 'environment' feature: we have found from our own 
> experience and also on irc that the risk of 'leak' between environments is so 
> high that makes it unusable on production.

This is fundamentally hard, and I wish we had a better answer here.  The 
closest we can get today is to use jruby and thus separate Java processes for 
each environment, or segregate the environments to different masters.  As long 
as we stick to ruby, they are fundamentally stuck.

We're working on this, but maybe not as fast as we should be.

> more emphasis on security. not long ago we were migrating a master to a PCI 
> dss environment and i recall making a question on irc about this subject. to 
> my surprise, i learned that the master relies on a fact for client auth and 
> not on the dn of the certificate!(or maybe i just got it all wrong). anyway, 
> my point here is that puppet stills some work in this area. 

I seem to remember this conversation, but I unfortunately don't know the 
details so I can't speak to specifics.

We take security very seriously, so when this kind of thing shows up we work 
hard to fix it quickly.  Hopefully Andy will step in with info on what the 
current status is on this.

> testing testing and more testing.  we need tools to test the catalogs 
> locally. (a coworker works on a tool to addr this issue 
> http://lpuppet.banquise.net) people are forced to use all sorts of hacks in 
> the toolchain like apply the catalogs on a test server to check that nothing 
> broke , and a bunch of other similar solutions.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.  We've seen more and more testing tools show 
up, like rspec-puppet, and while we know more would always be good, we keep 
hearing from customers that there's no substitute for running in vivo.  One of 
our major goals right now is making continuous delivery more easily attainable, 
which is all about being able to test changes on the way, but a lot of the work 
we're see now is either integrating existing tools into a CI system, or 
providing better visibility and control as the tools roll out.

What kind of testing would you like to be able to do?

> we would really love to see puppet grow, but on the number of features ;)

I think in general that's been our focus.  The work done to create this new 
parser is a small amount of the work going into the overall system, and the 
iteration work on the new parser is an even smaller fraction.

The fact is that Puppet's whole parser was written by me, years ago, and it was 
by about 10x the most complicated parser I'd ever written.  Henrick, who wrote 
this new parser, has been writing parsers for decades, and he's written a much 
better and more maintainable parser than we have right now.

While he was at it, he threw iteration into the mix, but the parser work has 
its own merits.  This should increase consistency, reduce bugs, increase fix 
and feature velocity, and make it easier to provide great tooling around the 
language.  All of that is exactly what you want.

It just happens to almost trivially enable features that were hard before, and 
sometimes devs left to their own devices just add things our users are asking 
for all the time. :)  I think that's awesome, and I think in this case, this 
feature isn't distracting from the other hard work being done.

I agree that the core sustaining engineering work is critical, but we do 
actually have users asking for new features all the time, and we can't ignore 
them or we'll look up in three years and everyone will be using SaltStack or 
Ansible.  We're just going to have to do both.

-- 
Luke Kanies | http://about.me/lak | http://puppetlabs.com/ | +1-615-594-8199
Join us at PuppetConf 2013, August 22-23 in San Francisco - 
http://bit.ly/pupconf13

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